Truth at the Bottom of a Well: Synge's The Well of the Saints

Truth at the Bottom of a Well: Synge's The Well of the Saints GRACE ECKLEY SYNGE'S CONSCIOUS STRNING IN The Well of the Saints to accomplish his ideal "to produce a myth more beautiful than nature"! stands revealed in such revisions as, first, the change in title from When the Blind See; second, his alteration of Mary Doul's mirror from "a bit of a bowl of tin" and later "a big glass was done in the town" to the final "I seen myself in them pools"; and third, his departure from the original story of new sight which concluded with the child's exclamation, "Oh Mother look at the beautiful flowers.,,2 (The setting is autumn and winter and the golden furze is only expected at the end of Act III; nothing blooms during the play.) These three items alone present the archetypes of water and well and seasons. Further, what Mary saw in her mirror - the long hair that brings her new hope for physical glory adds a prominent fourth. Also there is the blind couple's spiritual odyssey, complete with departure and return and new knowledge, and the obvious prelapsarian mental and physical state of Martin and Mary Doul; they have escaped the curses of work and childbirth. At the close of the play, when they serenely set forth alone, aware of wet and hazardous footing, along unknown paths with no domicile except the earth itself, they are what Synge said Hie artist should be - "a soul in harmony with some mood of the earth.,,3 That mood for them is the freedom of a wet south wind and a singing bird. For his blind primitives, Synge could make certain that the springtime of the local life is not forgotten, though for contrast there stands Timmy the Smith whose pious goal and doubtful glory is to turn the harvest immediately into bricks. To substantiate the old couple's youthful view of themselves, Synge carefully plotted the time element; Mary Doul has been blind since the age of seven, Martin remembers when he "was young and had fine sight." Their 193 194 GRACE ECKLEY visions of physical beauty have been, indeed, based.on practical experience and extended by imagination in much the same fashion as the Irish poet William Allingham described: Many fine things had I glimpse of, And said, "I shall find them one day." Whether within or without me They were, I cannot say.4 In a phrase which Synge used to explain the Douls' particular viewpoint, he spoke of their "folk theology," which to the sensitive Catholic is an unpalatable mixture of pre-Christian and Christian views, of which for the Douls and their like the prevailing aspect of religion over "superstition" is the certainty of guilt and the fear of punishment. The difference between a superstitious curse and a Christian curse is the concept of hell which embodies a contradiction expressed indirectly by the saint: "God has great mercy, but great wrath for them that sin." Martin Doul hopes to see "Molly Byrne and Timmy the Smith, the two of them on a high bed, and they screeching in hell" and adds "and it's fine care I'll be taking the Lord Almighty doesn't know." Synge confirmed that "Martin wishes to deceive God ... and he fears that even in Hell God might plague him in some new way if he knew what an unholy joy Martin has found for himself." Otherwise "folk theology" becomes evident when Mary Doul, for example, disbelieves the necessity of a combination of water from a particular, blessed well and the healing powers of the present saint. Patch Ruadh could bring the water from the well, she says, or (and this while the cure of Martin is in process) "the water from our own blessed well would do rightly if a man knew the way to be saying prayers," and this judgment puts prayers on the level of incantations. When Mary asserts Martin's right "to speak a big terrible word would make the water not cure us at all," Martin protests his helplessness: "who'd know rightly if it's good words or bad would...